Prometheus Awards honors first Australian sf writer; Dave Freer wins Best Novel for Cloud-Castles

Science fiction and fantasy is written all over the world – and LFS members have nominated fiction from several continents and many countries over the decades.

More than ever, the Prometheus Awards have become truly international.

For the first time, the Libertarian Futurist Society has recognized an Australian writer as winner of the Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

Dave Freer (Photo courtesy of author)

Dave Freer, an Australian who lives in Tasmania, has won the 2023 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for novels published in 2022.

Continue reading Prometheus Awards honors first Australian sf writer; Dave Freer wins Best Novel for Cloud-Castles

Chili peppers, drugs, desire and dictatorship: Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun, the 2017 Prometheus Award Best Novel winner

The Libertarian Futurist Society’s Appreciation series aims to make clear why each Prometheus winner deserves recognition as notable pro-freedom sf/fantasy. Here’s our Appreciation for Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun, the 2017 Best Novel winner:

By Michael Grossberg

The Core of the Sun, 
by well-known Finnish writer Johanna Sinisalo, is both feminist and libertarian in its evocative themes.

In the quirky and imaginative 2016 novel, translated by Lola Rogers from the Finnish language and published by Grove Press/Black Cat, Sinisalo vividly imagines a dystopian alternate history of Finland in which a patriarchal and authoritarian government enforces a social system, a War-on-Drugs Prohibition of individualistic pleasure and a eugenics program that breeds and virtually enslaves compliant women.

Set in 21st century Finland after a century of male-dominated government breeding and cultural reinforcement of its women to be slower-witted and more childlike, the fast-paced story unfolds in short chapters with epistolary and personal interludes that evoke a struggle of women within an alternate-reality Finnish culture somewhat evocative of The Stepford Wives (a cautionary feminist novel by Ira Levin, the Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for his dystopian novel This Perfect Day.)

Social stability and public health, along with a War-on-Drugs Prohibition, are strongly enforced and favored over social change, creativity, personal expression, self-fulfillment, curiosity and diversity – the latter, of course, all part of the constellation of values and attitudes that we know flourish much more under a classical liberal/libertarian polity.

Continue reading Chili peppers, drugs, desire and dictatorship: Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun, the 2017 Prometheus Award Best Novel winner